In a world gradually diverging from religions and traditions, the Sorbo family is exploring the hard question of whether people need religious beliefs, and looking at the impact of irreligion and atheism on American society.
Actress, filmmaker, and author Sam Sorbo, and her husband, actor Kevin Sorbo—star of the hit TV series “Hercules”—were approached to lead a tour to Israel. They produced a documentary sharing the insights the travelers gained from the journey, with the goal of re-discovering the meaning of religion in human life.
“We’ve broken with tradition in big, big ways. We are reaping problems that we have not experienced in our lifetimes, certainly, and in our recent memory as a culture.”
The school—the representative of education—ignores religion, religious values, and religious ideas, Sorbo explained. By ignoring religion, it teaches students to disdain it.
The Bible’s Meta-Narrative
There is an idea that the Bible is an antiquated book that does not apply to today’s world, Sorbo said. “I disagree. And, in fact, my children would disagree.” The Sorbos’ children are aged 21, 19, and 17.Sorbo called the Bible “the only book that reads you.”
“It’s a history book,” she said. “We disdain it but it is the best history book that we have.”
The stories in the Bible are not only true in the sense that they tell the real story, they also give a meta-narrative, Sorbo explained.
Connecting Israel to America’s Roots
The documentary made by the Sorbos includes a family who joined the tour to Israel, “trying to get back to roots because they felt that they had lost something of family, something of meaning, in their lives,” Sorbo said.Sorbo said that the film shows the connection between what they saw and learned in Israel and the roots of Judeo-Christian culture in America.
The documentary really delves into–from a personal viewpoint–how people respond when they are faced with actual events in history, the filmmaker said. She expressed the hope that it will inspire people to delve further into these events, both personally and from an American perspective.
“Jesus was the author of freedom,” Sorbo asserted. He was the first person who said that people should be free, because they are individually created by a Creator.
Christianity spread this idea of human freedom throughout Europe, but the cultures that embraced it are waning today, Sorbo noted. Meanwhile, slavery and an enslavement mentality is growing, along with resistance to a Judeo-Christian worldview.
Those who go through the American school system come out espousing the principle that slavery is wrong. But on the other hand, they support socialism because the schools have infused them with socialist ideas, Sorbo said. She called socialism “slavery.”
“What our school system has managed to do is confuse us ... I’m hoping that with this documentary, we get people to start thinking.”
Although Sorbo describes herself as outgoing, an extrovert, and a person who loves people, she said that the trip to Israel moved her deeply and changed her as a person. “I came back from Israel loving people more. I love them more now.”
Driving a Wedge Between Parent and Child
The school system separates children from their parents by driving a wedge between the parent and the child, Sorbo said.When a child comes home and shares what they learned in school about these topics, parents may disapprove of it. However, “what parents don’t understand is when you surrender your child to an institution, you’re telling that child: ‘Darling, the institution knows better than I do. Trust them; I cede my authority.’”
When the child comes home and challenges the parent’s knowledge or wisdom, “the parent has already lost; they’ve already given up their authority,” Sorbo stressed.
Common Core Math
As an example of the education system’s challenges to parental authority, Sorbo pointed to Common Core math.According to Newman, the only math expert on the Common Core Validation Committee, Dr. James Milgram of Stanford University, actually spoke out against the standards.
“The Core mathematics standards are written to reflect very low expectations,” Milgram said. “They are as non-challenging as possible with extremely serious failings.”
Common Core changed the standard way of doing math and “fixed it with something that was completely untried and untested,” Sorbo said. “Common Core math is one step further removed from logic. Math is the language of logic. And so clearly, they don’t want the children thinking logically.”
Sorbo describes a likely scenario: a child asks his or her parents for help with math homework, but the parents—who were taught math in the traditional, logical way—cannot help because they are not familiar with Common Core.
The child, however, is instructed by the teacher only to do math using Common Core methods. That child then begins to look down on his or her parents for being unable to help with basic math, Sorbo cautioned.
Home Schooling
Many teachers in American schools were educated by teaching colleges that are “notoriously Marxist,” Sorbo said, but “Marxism is against the family unit [and it] seeks to isolate individuals, so they are more easily controlled.”Sorbo maintains that schools separate the child from the parent by undermining parental authority. In doing so, they destroy the family and destroy children. However, she does not put the entire blame for this on teachers.
“The teachers who subscribe to this scenario are supporting an enslavement ideology,” Sorbo explained. “They just don’t realize it.”
“I’m not saying that they’re bad people. But I’m saying that they’re very misguided,” she said, admitting, however, that “there are some very bad teachers in the system.”
“We can fix that, and the moment that we fix it, we have a nation of free thinkers.”